BitTorrent creator rubbishes Microsoft's own version

"Vaporware" and "Complete garbage" were some of the more colourful descriptions being offered up by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen to sum up his feelings about Microsoft's attempt to create its own version of the BitTorrent protocol.

Writing in his Blog, Cohen rubbished the new P2P protocol, codenamed Avalanche, saying that it would never live up to its promises to fix transfer rate problems and disconnections, and that any favourable test results that Microsoft had achieved using its new software did not take varying transfer rates into consideration, nor the limitations of all the users' computers.

"Particularly worrisome for their proposed scheme is disk access," Bram said in his blog. "If the size of the file being transferred is greater than the size of memory, their entire system could easily get bogged down doing disk seeks and reads, since it needs to do constant recombinations of the entire file to build the pieces to be sent over the wire."